My readers know that I continue to struggle wiith the question of how modern commerce came to be.
The economist Thomas Malthus is the most accurate writer explaining why the previous 50,000 years of human society brought no commercial progress. Malthus explained how increases in food production were consumed by population growth and how starvation was the outcome of these two cycles being out of sync.
After Malthus no economist has made a significant contribution to understanding where this commercial explosion of the past two centuries came from.
The most prominent contributor to this field has been a sociologist, Max Weber, with his analysis of the Protestant ethic.
Recently the historian, David Landes, passed away. He had made a major contribution to understanding the role of clocks in the creation of modern industrial commerce.
I also give a great deal of credit specifically to Jonathan Israel who worked on the history of the Enlightenment and the Dutch Republic in the 17th century.
My simple question is: 'Why aren't economists focused on this issue'? Is it because they have not really recognized the transition from starvation to abundance?
Is it because they treat this as a question of developmental economics?
If it is the latter they have been incredibly incompetent in understanding what is happening. There is no developmental economic economist whose work is respected. They have done nothing to help developing countries. The miracles of development, Taiwan and South Korea, are ignored in developmental economics or treated as exceptions.
Economics does not seem to be the appropriate study for understanding the history of commerce.